The UK Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has upheld a complaint by Virgin Media against a national and regional press advert for BT's Total Broadband service. In the ad BT referred to itself as the "Best Performing Broadband" provider and sighted an independent survey by Epitiro as evidence for its claim.

However the claim failed to make clear that Epitiro's Jan'06 to Jan'08 surveys were only conducted with ADSL providers and did not include cable operators, such as Virgin Media. BT deemed that 'ADSL' would have been too complicated for most people to understand and did not include it in the advert; the ASA disagreed:


Though it's not stated in the ASA's ruling, Epitiro's survey is also a poor benchmark because it fails to include many smaller and more reliable providers. Therefore we believe that any blanket claim about being the "Best" would have been misleading.

Virgin Media also complained that BT had failed to include a prominent reference to the requirement of a BT line or similar. The ASA did not uphold this complaint, believing consumers could understand that a phone line would be required.